Prosocial behavior, social reward and affective state discrimination in adult male and female mice

Abstract

Prosocial behavior, defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit another, has long been regarded as a primarily human characteristic. In recent years, it was reported that laboratory animals also favor prosocial choices in various experimental paradigms, thus demonstrating that prosocial behaviors are evolutionarily conserved. Here, we investigated prosocial choices in adult male and female C57BL/6 laboratory mice in a task where a subject mouse was equally rewarded for entering any of the two compartments of the experimental cage, but only entering of the compartment designated as “prosocial” rewarded an interaction partner. In parallel we have also assessed two traits that are regarded as closely related to prosociality: sensitivity to social reward and the ability to recognize the affective state of another individual. We found that female, but not male, mice increased frequency of prosocial choices from pretest to test. However, both sexes showed similar rewarding effects of social contact in the conditioned place preference test, and similarly, there was no effect of sex on affective state discrimination measured as the preference for interaction with a hungry or relieved mouse over a neutral animal. These observations bring interesting parallels to differences between sexes observed in humans, and are in line with reported higher propensity for prosocial behavior in human females, but differ with regard to sensitivity to social stimuli in males.

Mu-opioid receptor-dependent changes in social reward across adolescence in mice

“…The pretest and posttest phases were performed in a two-compartment cage, as in previously published papers [16,21,25,34,35]. Each cage compartment contained a novel context (context A or context B) defined by type of bedding and gnawing block size and shape.…”

Editorial: Animal-friendly methods for rodent behavioral testing in neuroscience research

“…Indeed, the idea that rodents are cognitively inferior animals could be one of the reasons for which the welfare of laboratory rodents has often been overlooked, especially in the past centuries of scientific research. Importantly, the cognitive limitedness of rodents has been challenged by the neuroscientific and psychological investigations of the past few decades, which have revealed increasingly complex cognitive, emotional and social skills for these animals (Langford et al, 2006 ; Miller, 2006 ; Rutte and Taborsky, 2007 , 2008 ; Viana et al, 2010 ; Ben-Ami Bartal et al, 2011 ; Dolivo et al, 2016 ; Zentall, 2016 ; Schweinfurth and Taborsky, 2018a , b ; Sivaselvachandran et al, 2018 ; Ueno et al, 2018 ; Mogil, 2019 ; Reinhold et al, 2019 ; Templer, 2019 ; Cox and Reichel, 2020 ; Venniro and Golden, 2020 ; Joo et al, 2021 ; Kim et al, 2021 ; Rutishauser, 2021 ; Hernandez-Lallement et al, 2022 ; Engelhardt and Taborsky, 2023 ; Keysers and Gazzola, 2023 ; Misiołek et al, 2023 ; Yu et al, 2024 ).…”

Social Interaction Is Less Rewarding in Adult Female than in Male Mice

“…Research on the neurobiology of social interaction reward using laboratory rodents has mostly studied males, with only a few comparative studies [10,[19][20][21], thus contributing to the knowledge gap concerning sex-dependent differences in this type of reward. In fact, despite behavioral similarities between males and females, the mechanism(s) used to respond to social and emotional challenges and opportunities seem to be different [22].…”